Secret Recordings Fueled FBI Feud in Clinton Probe

Details of an FBI battle over whether to pursue a Clinton Foundation probe are emerging amid the continuing furor after FBI Director James Comey, shown testifying before the House Oversight Committee in July, disclosed to Congress that new emails had emerged that could be relevant to a separate FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email.

Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.

Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.

The account of the case and resulting dispute comes from interviews with officials at multiple agencies.

Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn, Robert Capers, who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment.

The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton.

Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama took the unusual step of criticizing the FBI when asked about Mr. Comey’s disclosure of the emails.

Amid the internal finger-pointing on the Clinton Foundation matter, some have blamed the FBI’s No. 2 official, deputy director Andrew McCabe, claiming he sought to stop agents from pursuing the case this summer. His defenders deny that, and say it was the Justice Department that kept pushing back on the investigation.

At times, people on both sides of the dispute thought Mr. Capers agreed with them. Defenders of Mr. Capers said he was straightforward and always told people he thought the case wasn’t strong.

Much of the skepticism toward the case came from how it started—with the publication of a book suggesting possible financial misconduct and self-dealing surrounding the Clinton charity. The author of that book, Peter Schweizer—a former speechwriting consultant for President George W. Bush—was interviewed multiple times by FBI agents, people familiar with the matter said.

The Clinton campaign has long derided the book as a poorly researched collection of false claims and unsubstantiated assertions. The Clinton Foundation has denied any wrongdoing, saying it does immense good throughout the world.

Mr. Schweizer said in an interview that the book was never meant to be a legal document, but set out to describe “patterns of financial transactions that circled around decisions Hillary Clinton was making as secretary of state.”

As 2015 came to a close, the FBI and Justice Department had a general understanding that neither side would take major action on Clinton Foundation matters without meeting and discussing it first. In February, a meeting was held in Washington among FBI officials, public-integrity prosecutors and Leslie Caldwell,the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division. Prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York—Mr. Capers’ office—didn’t attend, these people said.

The public-integrity prosecutors weren’t impressed with the FBI presentation, people familiar with the discussion said. “The message was, ‘We’re done here,’ ” a person familiar with the matter said.

Justice Department officials became increasingly frustrated that the agents seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions.

Following the February meeting, officials at Justice Department headquarters sent a message to all the offices involved to “stand down,’’ a person familiar with the matter said.

Within the FBI, some felt they had moved well beyond the allegations made in the anti-Clinton book. At least two confidential informants from other public-corruption investigations had provided details about the Clinton Foundation to the FBI, these people said.

The FBI had secretly recorded conversations of a suspect in a public-corruption case talking about alleged deals the Clintons made, these people said. The agents listening to the recordings couldn’t tell from the conversations if what the suspect was describing was accurate, but it was, they thought, worth checking out.

Prosecutors thought the talk was hearsay and a weak basis to warrant aggressive tactics, like presenting evidence to a grand jury, because the person who was secretly recorded wasn’t inside the Clinton Foundation.

FBI investigators grew increasingly frustrated with resistance from the corruption prosecutors, and some executives at the bureau itself, to keep pursuing the case.

As prosecutors rebuffed their requests to proceed more overtly, those Justice Department officials became more annoyed that the investigators didn’t seem to understand or care about the instructions issued by their own bosses and prosecutors to act discreetly.

In subsequent conversations with the Justice Department, Mr. Capers told officials in Washington that the FBI agents on the case “won’t let it go,” these people said.

As a result of those complaints, these people said, a senior Justice Department official called the FBI deputy director, Mr. McCabe, on Aug. 12 to say the agents in New York seemed to be disregarding or disobeying their instructions, these people said. The conversation was a tense one, they said, and at one point Mr. McCabe asked, “Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?’’ The senior Justice Department official replied: ”Of course not.”

Obamascare: Trump Will End Medicaid, Defund Black Colleges, Dig Up Michelle's Garden -- And That's All Just on Day One!

Do you know what Obama's telling the audiences that he spoke to today? He said the day Trump takes office, Medicare checks stop, Medicare or Medicaid? Medicaid will stop day one. Then Trump is going to slow down Pell grants, and then he said Trump, they'll probably even dig up Michelle's garden.

Recognizing this is a main theological premise that we have something divine within us that recoils at all the shit, meaning we came from a higher world, shitless in its essence, and may have hope to return there.

Late polling traditionally tightens in presidential races, as propagandistic polls with samples biased toward one candidate or another start to refine their models, ion order to be not-too-far off from the final vote counts.

What is unusual, maybe even unprecedented, is the volume of negative feelings toward both leading candidates. This makes turnout even more crucial than usual, for there is an excellent chance that numbers of people will fail to rouse themselves sufficiently to vote for a candidate they are not terribly enthusiastic over.

And that is why an item from this morning’s Rasmussen Reports is so significant. Rasmussen finding an advantage for Trump is not unexpected. So the most prominent finding may not make much of an impression on he Hillary camp and its media friends:

Republican Donald Trump has a three-point lead in Rasmussen Reports’ White House Watch survey.

Ho-hum, Rasmussen has had Trump in the lead before.

BUT:

Eighty-eight percent (88%) of voters say they are now certain how they will vote. Among these voters, Trump has a 10-point lead over Clinton – 53% to 43%. Johnson gets two percent (2%) and Stein one percent (1%). This is the first time any candidate has crossed the 50% mark. Among those who still could change their minds, it’s Clinton 36%, Trump 36%, Johnson 22% and Stein six percent (6%).

Ten points is way over a sampling or a model error. There is a good chance a thick slice of the uncertain voters will stay home. And a ties there for Hillary will not solve her ten point gap among those who will vote.

The article covers two issues: first, did the Russians hack the DNC and release other leaks to Wikileaks, and second, are the US's very public threats to counterattack Russia wise.

On the first issue, Bamford offers a lists of reasons why we should question the rushed conclusions reached by the DNC and government officials.

On the second, he points out the unknown problems that can surface from the US publicly stating they are going to respond to alleged Russian attacks. Bottom line, the unknowns may bite us in the ass.

It's a good article the main theme of which is that the same 17 intelligence agencies (interestingly given today's topic, not the FBI) who are now saying with 99% certainty that the Russians did it are the same agencies that told us Sadaam had WMDs, and the same agencies that continue to seemingly be hacked on weekly basis, in other words, our cybersecurity 'experts'.

Obama and Clinton are mutual disasters in failing to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of Russia. Russia has exceptional and existential retaliatory capabilities. Russia wants and demands respect. Russia also, with reason , has a persecution complex.

There is no benefit to the US in conducting a policy that plays into their paranoia and suspicions. It is a dangerous and a no win situation. Putin has proven diplomatically superior to our vastly over-rated community organizer and Crooked Hillary.

In one of the most jaw-dropping corporate statements I’ve ever heard, Royal Dutch Shell made a forecast of a much, much different variety of peak oil – a peak in crude demand that signals a terminal decline in the petroleum age, and one that might start as early as 2021,

“'We’ve long been of the opinion that demand will peak before supply,' [RD Shell] Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry said on a conference call on Tuesday. 'And that peak may be somewhere between 5 and 15 years hence, and it will be driven by efficiency and substitution, more than offsetting the new demand for transport.'”

The Bloomberg report on the statement notes that Exxon Mobil has a much rosier forecast for the industry, predicting a 20-per-cent increase in global demand before 2040."

A March 17, 2015 email chain shows the staff discussing Clinton’s use of personal email while at State Department.“…it was her practice, as well as ours, to conduct work on the .gov system,” argued senior aide Philippe Reines, in response to questions from the New York Times.

“They are looking at HER email, not ours. They don't know what next step we took,” Reines wrote. “If they've somehow seen some of the other 55k, we'd need to see each to determine what they were.”

Obama Was Notified Six Different Times When Hillary Changed Email Address – Lied to Press

Catherine Herridge: One of the key things we’ve learned in the FBI interviews known as 302s came from Clinton aide Huma Abedin. She told the FBI investigators that every time Hillary Clinton’s personal address changed they would update the White House so the president could continue receiving Hillary Clinton’s emails on his high security devices including his Blackberry.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.